How about Some Study?

Lest anyone should think that art is of no importance, consider this. From Britannica (Britannica DVD is an unbelievable bargain for what you get, by the way. I keep updating it, just to see how they improve it). I shall be short, so as to not take up too much time.

From Art, Philosophy of.

Art as a means to truth or knowledge

a. One of the things that has been alleged to be the purpose of art is its cognitive function:
b. art as a means to the acquisition of truth. Art has even been called the avenue to the highest knowledge available to man and to a kind of knowledge impossible of attainment by any other means.
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But what exactly does “truth to human nature” mean? The criterion is as old as Aristotle, who wrote that poetry is more true than history because it presents universal truths whereas history gives only particular truths and that poetry (dramatic fiction) shows how a person of this or that kind probably or necessarily would behave (or think, or feel).
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Is truth to human nature aesthetically relevant? That is, when present does it make the work of literature better and when absent or flawed does it make the work worse as literature? Here again there would be some difference of opinion, but a very large number of critics and aestheticians, in the tradition of Aristotle, would say that it matters aesthetically a great deal. The novelist does not have to be true to geography or history or astronomy, but he must be, as the 19th-century U.S
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it goes on to become almost to hard to read, but I should surely like to think about this much of it.
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Another idea: 22. Art as a means to moral improvement .

a. To say that a work of art is aesthetically good or has aesthetic value is one thing; to say that it is morally good or has a capacity to influence people so as to make them morally better is another. Yet, though the two kinds of judgments differ from one another, they are not entirely unrelated. Three views on the relation of art to morality can be distinguished:

Whew, that's enough to think about for awhile. Of course you can always buy Britannica and think about some more.

By the way, I think that the only real way to study with the computer is to have a text reader. www.nextup.com makes a text reader that is very reasonably priced, and the nice lady or guy can just read and read and read as long as you wish 'em to without getting tired.